substance dualism + descartes

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8 Terms

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body + soul as wholly separate substances

  • Descartes believed that because he could think away every aspect of himself except the act of thought itself (e.g. by doubting that the outside world-including his body – is real), that he must be thought (‘I think, therefore I am’). I can imagine myself without a body but I cannot imagine myself as existing without conscious awareness. So a potentially disembodied awareness is the real me. 

  • So my mind must be one kind of substance and my body must be another kind of substance, something physical. 

  • Treats the body as something controlled by the mind and external to it.

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pineal gland

  • In ‘Treatise on Man’, claims that the pineal gland is the seat of the imagination and common sense, and is the area of the soul 

  • All parts of our brain are double, and we also have two bodily organs for each sense, nostrils, eyes, ears (despite one tongue!), but our mind perceives only one thought/ impression 

  • Pineal organ is bit of brain that is singular so it must be the home of a single thought 

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WEAKNESS: Gilbert Ryle and the category mistake 

  • D was making a category mistake 

  • D argues that physical things are extended, divisible and non-thinking. Then argues that since the mind is the opposite, it must also be a non-physical thing 

  • Ryle argues that the concl doesn’t follow, and there could be another option- the mind might not be a ‘thing’ at all 

  • Lang we use to describe it confuses us about the category it belongs to, bc we use physical descriptors to describe the mental, which then confuses us because we assume the mind must also be a ‘thing to process’ 

  • The mind is instead a group of behavioural dispositions 

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COUNTER to ryle

  • Can be argued that reducing the mind to a group of dispositions doesn’t seen to satisfactorily capture/ explain the fact that conscious awareness at least ‘feels’ like it exists in some sense 

  • Whilst yes, it may be difficult to characterise that sense, it seems overly reductionist and minimal to regard it as merely existing as dispositions to behaviours 

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WEAKNESS: biological inaccuracies 

  • Innacurate anatomical assumptions 

  • Modern biology shows that the pineal gland secretes melatonin and plays a role in circadian rhythms, not mental processing 

  • It is not structurally/ functionally suitable for the role Descartes assigns it 

  • Churchland argues that all aspects traditionally attributed to the “soul” — including consciousness, identity, memory, and intentionality — are best understood as emergent properties of complex brain processes, not of an immaterial mind. 

  • She suggests that advances in neuroscience, including imaging technologies like fMRI and PET scans, allow us to correlate mental states with brain states. Personality changes caused by strokes, tumours, or neurodegenerative diseases show that what we call the “self” is tightly bound to brain integrity. This undermines Descartes’ claim that the self or soul is independent of the body. 

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COUNTER to churchland

  • Gaukroger  

  • Argues that D was working within the constraints of 17th century physiology, where brain structure was not well understood 

  • Focus on pineal gland was a speculative hypothesis, not an essential feature of his metaphysical system 

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STRENGTH: emphasis on certainty of the self 

  • Descartes’ method of doubt leads him to identify the thinking self as the only indubitable truth. This becomes a foundational starting point for modern epistemology. The soul (or mind) is known a priori, which prioritizes inner experience over sensory knowledge. 

  •  Descartes' soul theory emphasizes subjectivity and selfhood, which influenced later thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Sartre. The soul as the "thinking self" highlights personal identity and introspection, key elements in both philosophy and psychology

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COUNTER to certainty

David Hume rejects the idea of a stable, identifiable “soul” based on introspection. In A Treatise of Human Nature, he famously declares: “I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.” He argues that what we call the “self” is merely a bundle of perceptions, constantly in flux.